It's been a busy month for the Academic Team as we travel around the country visiting Imagine Cup teams to spend time and work with them towards getting ready for the UK finals on 21st June. In the 3 weeks of travel we have covered over 2300 miles, 2 hire cars, a star studded (Snow Patrol and a bone crushing Eamonn Holmes), several motorway services (M40 J10 being our fav :)), plenty of university bars for lunch, and a few embarassing stories...phew!

Thankfully its all been worth it! We had the pleasure of sitting down with 8 teams from the UK who are working on very exciting Software Design Challenge entries which tackle everything from the very serious business and academic type projects to really funky projects which enable young people to get the most out of their mobile devices! I have come away inspired and confident that the UK can do really well in this year's Imagine Cup finals in Japan and that anyone involved in the UK finals will have an amazing experience and see real benefit for their future careers as a result!

Good luck to all those involved and I look forward to seeing everyone's submissions on the 1st May!!

MJ

 

Better late than never...student events and an inbox from hell got in the way :) But I would like to jot down a couple of ideas that might inspire some budding UK Software Design Teams out there to develop a really compelling application for this year's UK Imagine Cup finals.

 

I've spent a few weeks talking to lots of students about entering the Imagine Cup and why they *must* enter and on the whole the biggest bit of feedback I get is that they haven't thought of a really good idea..hence this blog to try and inspire some great applications.

 

"Imagine a world where technology dissolves boundaries"

 

I'm going to throw out a couple of random ideas to see if we can get some thoughts going. These aren't solution ideas but more for you to think of an area where technology can help and go off and think of the solution yourselves…

 

- A service for military personnel who are away from their friends and families for prolonged periods of time which provides a media rich link back to the lives of their families onto a mobile device in the field.

 

- With the move to outsourced developers how can technology help dissolve boundaries between programmers and the field consultants, architects and support staff

 

- In a disaster effected area how can technology help reduce the difficulties (boundaries) of getting aid to the most hard hit areas (such as with the Tsunami)

 

- With a mobile sales force how can location aware technology allow 'road warriors' to effectively communicate and meet up with fellow staff at motorway junctions, share information while driving (safely) and generally feel more part of an office environment while out on the road

 

- How can scientists share information more easily across research groups, disciplines and geographies

Mark

Ever wanted to win a load of money? Ever wanted to do something that sets you apart from all your peers? Ever wanted to get an incredible job in a leading technology company?

If you answered yes to all of them then you are probably wanting to click that image above! The Imagine Cup is a perfect opportunity for you to put your coding and IT abilities to the test and create something that can change the world and your life!

In the UK we have had great success with the Imagine Cup and we want to continue that success. All you have to do is look at the previous two years of UK students. Andy Sterland now works with me in the Academic Team, Phil Price spent the summer out in Microsoft Corp, Andy Grieves works for an Xbox games company, and the list goes on....

Good Luck!

Microsoft have just launched the 2005 edition of Media Center Edition of Windows XP - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/default.mspx 

Being a Microsoft employee I have seen many demos and had the opportunity to play with MCE a fair few times (we had them set up on campus and they are at all the conferences we run) and have always been thoroughly impressed with the features (especially the 10' UI). But I have never thought it was good enough to justify spending £1000+ on a PC as the main functionality I would use, recording live TV, is available in the UK from Sky+ (www.sky.com) for a £200 (+ monthly subscription which I already pay to get premium channels).

With the advent of 2005 edition I am seriously reconsidering buying one for the living room! It now feels a lot more mature as a product and integrates with a lot of other products to give users the end-to-end experience with all digital media. Stuff like:

- automatic synchronisation with portable media devices
- dual tuner capability (watch one channel, record another)
- managed code SDK for developing enhancements to the MCE functionality (<grin>it's the developer in me!</grin>)

I really like the idea of being able to record TV onto my MCE, watch the stuff I don't have time to or am away from home (travel is a big part of this job:)) and watch it when I want. And even better with the release of cool new devices like Creative's Portable Media Center (the Zen) I can take all my media (movies, tv, music) on the move with me - it would be a dream come true to be able to plug a set of headphones in on a 3 train journey or a long haul flight to the US and catch up on all the TV I missed for the past couple of weeks.

Anybody out there have one?

Mmmmmmm, mark dreams of a plasma tv + media centre PC + 5.1 sound (drooling over keyboard)

Just a little bit of random Friday afternoon in work linkage...

Wanna be a hacker....then get a hacker handle like me... http://www.rootcompromise.org/hhg/index.php   

'Skeleton Enigma'

I've just noticed the launch of a new UK MSDN site which is designed to give UK developers a personalised view of the mammoth library of technical information that is MSDN.

It's great, I now get an RSS feed with all the info I'm interested in: ASP.NET, .NET, C#, Web Services, Game Dev, 64-bit and others - I have a feeling that this is going to be a useful channel for finding out about the latest content and events for developers in the UK. Now if only theSpoke did something like this ;)

Check it out http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/preferences.aspx (uses PassPort)

It's been a while since I last hit the MyBlog_Add.aspx page :) and thats because things have been quite busy and blogging fell to the bottom of the pile.

At the end of June, I flew out to 'crazy' Amsterdam for Tech.Ed 2004 EMEA - developer, mobility and IT Pro audiences were all very well catered far with presentations, hands on labs, chalk/talks and more technology than you can swing an Xbox owning, SmartPhone using, VS developing, .NET loving geek like me. I was there in a hosting role, with 9 academics and 3 student partners looking after their needs during the conference - my first outing on my own doing this. It was quite tiring but a really good opportunity for me to get to know a broad spectrum of academics and their teaching/systems needs.

I'm sure if you've read any of the blogs of people that were there you would know of the big announcements which include the beta 1 release of the Visual Studio Express line of products. These dev environments are targeting the young hobbyist developer who is getting out in programming - check out http://channel9.msdn.com/express/default.aspx for more info. And if you missed out on the Imagine Cup this year then maybe the Summer of Express coding contest is your second chance to do battle with C# or VB.

After Tech.Ed I had a week in Reading before jumping on another longer flight to Atlanta for our internal company conference. I was ot there for almost 9 days. This was a great opportunity to revisit the content I missed at Tech.Ed and learn even more - I tried to vary what I attended from day to day to get the widest spectrum of technical content and most value out of the trip. It was also good fun to spend time with the other members of the Academic Developer team from around the world.

Now I'm back and spending some time in the office before the new Academic year kicks off in the UK - I'm off in the middle of August for a couple of weeks on some needed annual leave - planning on spending time chilling on the beach in Majorca for a week and then home to see my family for a second week.  Then back to work and executing on all our plans.... :)

Its been a manic couple of weeks and I'm just getting the chance to do some blogging (the reading as well as this bit of writing).

In a Mike Bright category stylee :) ...

Imagine Cup

The team were up at TVP for 2 weeks coding away on their entry for the worldwide finals in Brazil. They have done a sterling job at creating a great concept and business idea - the coding is still going on to get a really polished sexy looking app ready to compete with the other entries. Fingers crossed they do well...

Tech.Ed 2004 Amsterdam

I'm getting ready to take 9 Academics and 3 MSPs out to Amsterdam for the annual Developer and IT Pro Microsoft event. It will be good to see Rob, Dave and the other academics I've had the pleasure of meeting over the past year in the Academic team and hopefully the stuff we've got laid on will make the conference a productive and *enjoyable* event.

If you are out at Tech.Ed let me know and maybe we could hook up with the other theSpoke bloggers for a drink...

HPC and Grid

A very cool and very daunting challenge has been set on my desk in work - to become the technology lead for HPC and Grid technologies in the Academic Team in the UK. I know very little about both sets of technologies but I am so excited about the challenge. This is going to be a big growth area in IT as we see more and more services using distributed supercomputing to perform tasks.

I had the pleasure of meeting with the Director of HPC and spent a day down at Southampton e-Science centre were a lot of very good work around Windows clusters is in production/planning. 

I'm going to have a fun this summer reading up and playing with this technology.

Oh yes crashing that Tornado figher jet...

Kenji, a guru on Windows clusters and an Aerodynamics lecturer at Southampton has done some v.cool work around Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 which included 2 massive physical simulators. So I got to fly a tornado fighter jet around Southampton and Reading which included me crashing the jet... :)

I am currently in the throws of compiling content and working with a great creative agency on the look and feel of a resource CD for students and faculty wishing to get further into DirectX 9 development and in particular coding "Managed" DirectX 9 using C#.

The content at the moment consists of 3 distinct areas:

- Managed DX9 Zone discussing how to write games for C# and the CLR. .NET Show, Sample Chapters and PPTs
- Classic DX9 Zone - for the hardened games programmer. Contains a complete academic website from a top UK university.
- Techniques+Xtras - contains some PPTs on techniques that are used by games developers in industry. Plus links to useful communities, newsgroups and other sites.

We really want to get students keen on games programming to start using Managed DX9.

Are there any budding games developers out there who would be interested in this kind of content? Is there anything out there on the web that should be on the resource kit?

This project has inspired me to do some games dev in C#. I am thinking Pong first then maybe Asteroids :)

Dominic and I are planning our renewed assault on the world with Project Hurricane - we want to have a far cooler community SDK with more functionality that appeals to student communities and we want to offer a service which allows any student community in the UK to set up a community instantly at the click of a button.

We need a little bit of help though in defining what makes a great community?! How do they form? How do they stay alive? Whats so good about them? What is needed on the technology side to make these communities great?

If you know a great community (excluding theSpoke obviously), leave a comment in this blog entry and I'll check it out.


PS And I'm still on the look out for a women's beach volleyball team at a university (anywhere in the world, preferrably Australian or Californian) that requires a commmunity website :D

Just been checking out Morris's blog and read that Snow Patrol are blogging here. This is so cool - they are my current fav band and they hail from one the best parts of the UK, Northern Ireland.

If you guys are reading this - any chance of a signed album for a fellow Ulsterman? :P

When you do my kind of job and have lots of time on planes, trains and automobiles there is a lot of time to ponder life, love and fruit of the loom. Only yesterday I had a couple of Project Hurricane ponders.

One was an idea for a webcast plug-in which would allow a managed way to have webcasts within a PH community site. I started brainstorming this idea with Hardeep and we got thinking about the flow of the plug-in and how users would interact. I had to get this down on paper or it would be lost forever....however my bag was up in the overhead luggage part and it was during takeoff :). Never fear...the sick bag was sitting looking at us. So, we got it out and started scribbling all our ideas down - so the tagline "ideas can come from anywhere..." should have "even on sickbags on planes" added :).

The second idea and one that might interest Mario and Morris is taking Hurricane.NEXT (on the Whidbey version of .NET) and writing modules and functionality that would hook a community website (eg a Gaming community at a UK/US university) directly to the relevant area of theSpoke. There are loads of areas where this could become really compelling for theSpoke users
- blog syncrhonisation (one blog on theSpoke filtered down to all the PH communities that the user participates in)
- hub info/whats going on syndication plug-ins for Hurricane (this could easily be done in RSS:)). Allow communities to grab info and have it directly on their site.
- Highlighting users on a  PH community who are theSpoke members and also have similar identification on theSpoke of people who belong to members of PH communities.

I'm sure there is lots more we can do along this. Leave your ideas in the comments...

Mario - we could take this discussion offline if your are interested... :)

I have been on leave for the past 10 days chilling out seeing friends and family back home in Ireland. Now that I'm back I am refreshed and back on the case with some of my actions for the remainder of this fiscal year in work...one of those things is planning on the future of Project Hurricane next year.

I just wanted to share with the world about the plans and how students in the UK can get involved:

- We have an imminent Service Pack for the PH SDK which improves some of the core functionality and some of the bugs. Dominic is taking ownership of this.

- A complete "re-jazz" of the main www.projecthurricane.com portal to be cooler and have a more obvious navigational element to get the SDK and to register your community (these are www.projecthurricane.com/gethurricane and www.projecthurricane.com/register in case ur interested :)). Creating a developer portal for the ongoing development and support for plug-in developers at http://develop.projecthurricane.com

- "Recruiting" key UK students to help work as part of a core team (with Dom and I) on delivering 2 releases in 2005. A 1.5 and 2.0 release - both with loads of new functionality and improved user experiences (more on this later). We need top students who are really passionate about working on a cool .NET project (ASP.NET/C# experience nice but not a requirement) - if you are leave a comment here...

- Automated subweb hosting: web hosting which automatically deploys a hurricane instance and gives any student access to their own community website with full control of its look and feel and functionality (as long as it runs Project Hurricane). This should be the key to getting mass adoption of the PH SDK.

Loads more but I don't want to ruin all the surprises.

Thanks to Mario for setting up a Hub for Project Hurricane.

I am hoping it will get theSpoke members as excited about the Hurricane SDK as we are and get the WW student community picking it up and developing for it.

Visit it here

Inspiration Tour

Hardeep and I are still trooping around the UK doing the Inspiration Tour. Things are tailing off now for the Easter break (much needed as my voice is constantly sore from talking to 100s of students a week) and after that we'll be continuing right up until the end of May.

Rugby

Drum roll please....Ireland came an amazing 2nd in the Six Nations beating World Cup holders and CP's team, England. Only those darn French playing a great tournament stopped us from taking the title. Although we can console ourselves with the Triple Crown (a sub-competition between the British Isles teams - Eng, Wales, Scot + Irl)

MSP

We had our second MSP event this Sunday/Monday at our MSN offices. It was a great 2 days starting with an open bus tour of London (House of Parliament is tiny :D). I gave a 30 minute update on the future of the Hurricane SDK - there seemed to be a few interested faces in getting involved in the "core" SDK team. Once the tour has finished up for the year and we go into our new financial year I will hopefully have more time to devote to the support of the "Hurricane Foundation" within my work time and also more time at home to do coding (<grin> I'm itching to do some proper dev) on the SDK.

Also saw some seriously cool kit at the event from our Mobility guys and MCE Product Mgr including the Portable Media Centre coming out this summer - I drooled over this for about 10 mins. Needless to say I will be ordering one as soon as they are out (tres tres useful in my role travelling around the UK so much on planes and trains).

It's still go go go until 10 April when I will be taking some well earned rest at home with my family. This week and weekend I'm up in Glasgow with Dave instead of Hardeep (as he's in New York), then off to the UK Imagine Cup finals for 3 days somewhere in Oxfordshire (can't wait for this as it's 3 days of geeking it up with the finalists)